ABSTRACT
The TBRS model is close to this idea with its hypothesis of an alternation of phases of loss and reconstruction of memory traces. Nairne explained that this idea is intuitively appealing, probably because it can be expressed with concrete metaphors such as a juggler trying to maintain a set of plates, but endeavoured to discard it by accumulating arguments against the existence of both decay and rehearsal. As nicely summarised in Shah and Miyake, this issue of whether working memory is unitary or non-unitary has been a source of controversy for decades. More interestingly for the separability of the verbal and visuospatial systems in working memory, the decrement of recall for the Corsi blocks was stronger under concurrent tapping than under articulatory suppression. Patterns of selective interference clearly indicate some domain specificity, but they do not discard the existence of domain-general limited resources at a more central level of the information processing system.
